IRLANDA

SUMMARY:

I. Geography

II. Civil and religious history

III. Legal status of the Church and school system

IV. Literature

V. Liturgy and art.

I. GEOGRAPHY

Ireland is, by area (82,500 sq. km.; more than three times the size of Sicily), the third largest island in Europe and the second largest in the British archipelago.

An extreme western outpost of the continent (submarine cables to America depart from Valentia), it consists of a broad, roughly quadrangular plateau of ancient rock, depressed in the center and bordered to the northeast and southwest by two belts of ancient relief, intensely worn down by normal erosion and Pleistocene glaciation (nowhere reaching 1,200 m.). The climate is characterized by mild temperatures, low thermal range, constant humidity (rain throughout the year), and persistent cloud cover. The central plain, largely limestone, is waterlogged, with water stagnating in lakes and marshes, favoring the formation of peat over wide areas. Nearly half the land surface is occupied by natural meadows and pastures, which support a significant livestock industry (especially cattle); agriculture, industry (lacking mineral resources), and even maritime activity are of minor importance. The country is therefore relatively sparsely populated (2.9 million inhabitants; 43 per sq. km.), with heavy emigration (in a century the population has more than halved). Only the capital, Dublin (510,000 inhabitants), exceeds 100,000; overall, the population lives dispersed in the countryside. The Irish are 93% Catholic, with the remainder Protestant. Since 1921, Ireland was part of the British Commonwealth, except for the northern region (13,600 sq. km., 1.3 million inhabitants with its capital Belfast), which enjoyed and continues to enjoy its own autonomy. From April 1949, the ties binding it to England were severed, and Ireland became a sovereign and independent republic.

Giuseppe Caraci

II. CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS HISTORY

I. PRE-CHRISTIAN ERA

Ireland was originally inhabited by a short-statured, dark-haired people, identified by paleoethnologists as Iberian, Ligurian, or Mediterranean, who during the Neolithic period populated all of Western Europe and left behind in Ireland—especially in the western counties of Kerry and Sligo—megalithic structures (dolmens and cromlechs) as evidence of their presence. The Celts (v. SCOTS), known in Ireland as Scoti or Scotti, Gaels, and who still constitute the ethnic core of the country, of Aryo-European stock, tall and fair-haired, bearers of the Bronze Age civilization, penetrated Ireland in the 8th century BCE, pushing the dark race westward. They lived under a tribal system, in which the tribe was considered the owner of the territory, grouped under a chief in villages enclosed by palisades.

The tribes were divided into five major provinces: Ulster, Leinster, Connacht, Desmond (northern Munster), and Thomond (southern Munster), each subject to a provincial king (rí), and all acknowledging the more nominal than actual authority of a high king (ard rí) who resided at the Hill of Tara in County Meath, northwest of Dublin, the center of pagan tradition that faced the Christianity established there by St. Patrick against the druidic priesthood of King Loegaire.

Irish juridical and social life was governed by a traditional legal system known as the "Law of the Brehons" (= jurists), also called "Law of Nature," which Christianity later replaced with the "Law of the Letter" (Senchus Mór). Every three years, a pan-provincial festival (feis) was held at Tara to affirm, against tribal particularism, the unity of the race.

Much has been embellished by imagination regarding the historical origins of the country, of which the Irish had no precise recollection.

There are three cycles containing the mythical and heroic poetry of Ireland: the mythological cycle, the Ulster cycle, and the Leinster cycle, or Fenian cycle, whose last representative is Ossian. According to the mythological cycle, three generations of gods occupied the island: the first led by Partholon, who fought against a dark and infernal host of gods, perhaps a memory of those venerated by the "Mediterranean" inhabitants; the second led by Nemed, who fought against the dark power of the Fomorians and vanished without issue; the third, the Tuatha Dé Danann, "divine descendants of Dana," a host of luminous gods who occupied the land until the arrival of the Milesians. He, the mythical ancestor of Milesius, i.e., the Irish Celts, who drove out the gods, reducing them to the status of fairies and elves (sidhe). According to traditional chronology, the Milesians are said to have arrived in Ireland in 1300 BCE, and 118 kings of their line are said to have ruled the country before the arrival of St. Patrick (432 CE).

The deities worshipped by the pagan Irish included Dana, the ancestress of the gods; Bilé, corresponding to the Dis Pater of the continental Celts, who forms with Dana the Irish divine generative pair; Lir, sea god; Lug, god of light, healing, and art; Ogma, god of eloquence;

Even in Italy the beneficent Irish diaspora arrived. Already in the mid-6th century, St. Orso is remembered in the Aosta Valley; St. Frediano, bishop of Lucca; in the 7th century, St. Columbanus (v.), Bobbio (v.); St. Cataldus of Lismore, bishop of Taranto, on whose coast he had been cast ashore by a storm on his return from Jerusalem; in the 9th century, St. Donatus, bishop of Fiesole, contemporary of the learned Irishman Dungalus, whom King Lothair appointed to the University of Pavia.

The Irish monastic diaspora carried with it, given the particular form of hierarchy tied to tribal constitution rather than to a territory centered on a cathedral church, an excessive number of prelates, true "wandering bishops" who claimed to exercise even in the dioceses of the continent the powers of bishops, provoking disturbances to which various local councils sought to remedy.

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**IRELAND - Historical outline (5th-7th centuries): 1) Dioceses; 2) Monasteries.**

The Irish monks, in their fervent religious life, dedicated themselves to severe devotional practices (assiduous prayer with daily recitation of the entire Psalter, daily prostrations repeated even three hundred times, with repeated Signs of the Cross, with baths in icy water, with prayers recited standing with arms outstretched in that position called *crossfigill*, "vigil or prayer of the Cross," which is still practiced in the pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory in the sanctuary of Lough Derg) and to transcribing and illuminating manuscripts, to working with chisels creating compositions in which exuberant fantasy often ran riot at the expense of grace and harmony.

The names of the principal monasteries of the country are known: Kilkenny, on the island of Aran, founded by St. Enda; Clonard, founded around 520 by St. Finnian; Moville, founded by another St. Finnian around 540; Ossory, founded in 549 by St. Kieran; Clonmacnoise, founded by another St. Kieran in 544; Iona, on the island of the same name on the Scottish coast, founded in 563 by St. Columba or Columbanus (v.), to whom are also owed the Irish monasteries of Derry and Durrow; Glendalough, founded in 541 by St. Kevin; Clonfert in 544 by St. Brendan; Bangor, in 558 by Comgall, where St. Columbanus (v.) and St. Gall were trained. The 6th and 7th centuries were the golden age of Irish Christian and cultural formation.

III. IRISH EXPANSION

These monasteries, in addition to being centers radiating light throughout Ireland, were also the starting points of a missionary expansion into Europe that constitutes the glory of Irish Chris-

tendom.

Moreover, the Irish Church followed special liturgical usages that differed from those of continental Europe. The most discordant was that relating to the celebration of Easter, which the Irish still fixed according to the old computation that placed the spring equinox on March 25 and made Easter fall between the 14th and 20th day of the moon, i.e., between March 25 and April 21, whereas the Church of Rome, accepting the calculation of Dionysius Exiguus based on the Alexandrian 19-year cycle, to avoid coincidence with the Jewish Passover whenever the 14th day of the moon fell on a Sunday, had established the spring equinox on March 21, the celebration of Easter on the following Sunday between the 15th and 21st day of the moon, i.e., between March 22 and April 23. The second point of discordance was the form of the tonsure used by the Irish, which was cut transversely in the manner described above and not entirely according to the Roman usage. The third point, more common among the Celtic peoples of Britain than among the Irish, was to have episcopal consecration performed by a single bishop rather than by three.

Ireland lived peacefully within its inviolate borders until the Danish invasion (792–1014), which first struck the coasts—Limerick, Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Wexford—and then penetrated inland, damaging churches and monasteries, until the High King Brian Boru put an end to Danish predominance on April 23, 1014, though he was killed in the Battle of Clontarf.

But this victory, which was also achieved against Irish elements allied with the Danes, did not quell internal strife, which lasted until Dermot, King of Leinster, engaged in conflict with the High King Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, sought help from Henry II, King of England of the House of Tudor. Henry first sent Welsh and English troops to Ireland (1169) and then went there himself (1171), establishing himself in Dublin.

From this time begins the transformation of Ireland according to the economic, social, and hierarchical system of Western Europe.

As early as 1118, Gilbert, Bishop of Limerick and papal legate, at the Synod held at Rathbreasail, had established two metropolitan sees, one in the north at Armagh, which was the ancient primatial see of Ireland, with 12 suffragan sees, and the other in the south at Cashel, with an equal number of dependent sees.

These measures of the Synod were championed by St. Malachy, Primate of Ireland, friend of St. Bernard and advocate of a reform in the Roman sense of the Irish Church. At the Synod held at Kells in 1152, under the presidency of Cardinal G. Paparoni, legate of Eugenius III, four metropolitan provinces were established: Armagh, with the title of primatial see, Cashel, Dublin (freed from the jurisdiction of the English archbishop of Canterbury), and Tuam, under which the suffragan episcopal sees were grouped. This arrangement remains in force to this day.

IV. THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND

Henry II, who had landed in Ireland with the authorization of Pope Adrian IV, an Englishman, who commissioned him (bull *Laudabiliter*, 1155) to regulate ecclesiastical affairs and uproot vices from the Lord’s field, at a new council held at Cashel (1172) completed in disciplinary matters (election of bishops, episcopal mensa, tithes to the clergy, Peter’s Pence) the work of previous councils, under the presidency of the papal legate Christian O’Conaire.

But as soon as the king departed, leaving in the Pale, a fortified trench from Dublin to Dundalk under exclusive English control, his representative, two hostile groups immediately formed in the country: the Irish and the Anglo-Normans. Thus began three centuries of more or less open hostility, which intensified during the Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster, because the Irish supported the Yorkists against King Henry VII Tudor of Lancaster, who had ascended the throne in 1485. To put an end to the island’s eternal dissensions, Henry VII sent Sir Edward Poynings to Ireland, who issued two laws (Poynings’ Acts, 1494) by which laws passed by the Irish Parliament had no validity without the sanction of the King of England, while laws enacted in England were to be valid also for Ireland.

The Tudors (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth) sought to create the unity of Ireland by reducing the power of native chieftains and centralizing law and administration, against the autonomy inherent in tribal tradition.

Henry VIII began by calling himself king instead of Lord of Ireland, introducing Protestantism into the country by appointing Anglican bishops who formed the Established Church at the expense of exiled Catholic bishops and confiscated monasteries. His son Edward followed the same path; his daughter Mary, a Catholic, partly remedied the damage suffered by the Church but inaugurated the plantation system, consisting in giving land to English cultivators, dispossessing the legitimate users, which meant uprooting from Ireland the tribal system and the traditional law of the Brehons that regulated II. The other daughter Elizabeth relentlessly maintained the system of social dispossession and confirmed her father’s anti-Catholic measures, but had to face three rebellions: one in the north, one in the south, and a third, again in the north and more terrible, led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, in Ulster, who defeated the English at Yellow Ford, thus sparking an anti-English revolt across the island and having himself proclaimed Supreme King of Ireland. Despite Spanish aid, however, Hugh was defeated at Kinsale and had to renounce his title and any further anti-English action.

When the Stuarts (James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II) succeeded the Tudors on the English throne, the Irish hopes rose again but were soon disappointed because James I intensified the plantation system mainly in Ulster, the seat of the last rebellion, introducing English and Scottish planters, uncompromising Presbyterians, and provoking a fierce insurrection in Connaught (1641) led by Rory O’More, which spread to almost the entire island and was directed by a supreme council of six members chosen by the Assembly of the clergy gathered in Kilkenny in 1642.

But once again internal strife arose, this time between the old Irish and the partisans of intransigence